


We Open In Venice

by BiblioMatsuri



Series: DP Side Hoes Week 2021 [1]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 06:22:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29912730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BiblioMatsuri/pseuds/BiblioMatsuri
Summary: Lancer took a moment to breathe. He wasn’t as young as he used to be. He couldn’t just yell for three minutes straight without getting light-headed. Had he really led a cheer chant lasting half an hour in twelfth grade? Time just flew.- - -Based on the DP Side Hoes Week prompts for 3/7/21: Mr. Lancer and reflection. Title from the soundtrack of the Broadway playKiss Me, Kate. (Also based on that one throwaway joke about Mr. Lancer in a dress.*)TW for swearing, and for deliberately cavalier treatment of genders.
Relationships: Mr. Lancer & OC
Series: DP Side Hoes Week 2021 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2199633
Kudos: 7





	We Open In Venice

Between choir, cheerleading, and community theater, Ed Lancer had spent literal years of his life in the spotlight. It had given him a solid background in the fundamentals of public speaking, and thoroughly familiarized him with the great works of the Western literary canon.

It had also given him literal years of backstage experience, futzing around with makeup and desperately scrambling to fix a damaged set-piece, lost props and missing scripts and that dark day the entire benighted lighting control system up and died twenty minutes before the opening night’s performance was set to begin. He’d had decades of experience fixing last-minute foul-ups, even before he started teaching.

None of this had taught him how _not_ to swear. The use of book* titles had been a last-moment word swap born of sheer desperation to not lose his job.

*“Book” here used as a placeholder for any sort of literary work, from novels to scripts to collections of poetry. TV series or episode titles could work in a pinch, but the point was to educate the kids in English-language literature, not how to swear in a combination of modern English, Early Modern English, and the smattering of Yiddish his college theater troupe had somehow folded into their lingua franca.

After twenty-odd years of teaching, Lancer had enough experience in this particular form of code-switching to not “drop an F bomb,” as the kids would say.

Then again, there were no impressionable teenagers present, so he could swear all he wanted.

He took a breath. “Mother-”

\- - -

“-of a boil-ridden _sow!_ ”

Lancer took a moment to breathe. He wasn’t as young as he used to be. He couldn’t just yell for three minutes straight without getting light-headed. Had he really led a cheer chant lasting half an hour in twelfth grade? Time fucking flew.

“You all right, there?”

“Yes,” he sighed. “I’m fine. I only broke a nail.”

Four glamorously made-up heads peered at the offending digit.

“Lana, you’re bleeding,” Bennie pointed out.

He just sighed again.

\- - -

After a bit of first aid and a non-aspirin painkiller, Lancer was feeling much better. Unfortunately, he wasn’t going to be able to fit into his shoes.

“I look like I have six toes,” he opined.

“Don’t you have ten?” That was Bennie.

“You know what she means!” And Lizette.

“Please stop yelling.” Kris again.

“Y’want to borrow some flats?” Mikayla, and what a godsend she was today.

“You’re a treasure, Mic.”

“Not offstage, Lans,” xe corrected.

“Sorry. It’s, ah. Been a while.”

“A _while_ , she says. So two years now is a ‘while’?”

“Zee, don’t be a dickus.”

“Yeah, _Zee_.”

“Mikayla, I will stab you with this eyeliner pencil.”

“Ah,” he cut in. “I was just wondering, where are the lovebirds tonight? And Jamie, for that matter. Usually they’re right behind Kris.”

“My moms are having a night to themselves,” Mikayla said. “Also Ma had the flu last week, so Mom doesn’t want her trying to dance and passing out ‘cause her lungs are still being shit.”

Ah, right. “Did she get the get-well card?”

A bilious look. “Did you all _have_ to load it up with glitter?”

“That was me!” Bennie giggled.

Or maybe a better word would be “flounced,” all things considered. In a fabulously pastel baby-blue on canary-yellow getup that managed to give the general impression of both a beribboned nightgown and a walking pompom, Bennie was clearly being the girliest girl she could tonight. There were lace frills, and buttons in the shape of teddy-bear heads.

It had tiny cap-sleeves.

The equally pastel sports padding scattered around her corner of the dressing room* helped remind one that Bennie was six-foot-four and built not unlike a genial tank. She had, in younger years, found occasional work as a bouncer.

*The large unisex bathroom at Goldie’s House**. Thank whichever gods hadn’t yet forsaken Amity Park, this early in the night it was fairly clean.

**A multipurpose performance space that doubled duty as Amity Parks second best-known gay bar; “gay” used here as a placeholder for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and so on and so forth and on into infinity. Amity Park wasn’t that large a town.

These days, Bennie’s day job involved a lot of very young children needing check-ups, getting ear infections, and needing routine vaccination shots. You who are about to be spit up on, we salute you.

Lizette, across the aisle, preferred to present as a more classical sort of dramatic femme. She dressed like a nineteenth-century dancing girl who had just sashayed into a questionably-accurate reproduction of a historical saloon. Everything was in shades of not-quite-pink, from the cream shirt and ivory petticoats, to the deep red overskirts and high heels.

The long curly wig helped, too.

Kris’s outfit was plain only by comparison, with a high-necked silvery jacket over a sea-green A-line gown that cut off at just over the knee, fading into layers of increasingly blue tulle. It looked almost as if she and Bennie had tried to coordinate, but they’d both veered far off course somewhere along the way.

Knowing them, that’s exactly what had happened.

Mikayla, meanwhile, looked as though she’d walked here straight from the relatively-clean beginnings of a rave, or perhaps an illicit rock concert. Fishnets and platform boots, a violet cinch-waist dress, chains of jangly jewelry – and, over it all, an oversize coat that looked to be made entirely of black feathers.

And then there was Lana, her six-foot strawberry blonde self in a carnation-pink tower of ruffles that would hopefully hold up her very large (and very fake) bosom while still disguising that old middle-aged paunch.

Of course, the curves that Liz showed off were entirely the result of clever stuffing and tailoring. Kris was a mechanic. Mikayla was extremely loud about her androgyny. And Bennie, again, was a brick fucking shithouse.

Lana sighed. The nice ones were too-oft taken, straight, or just Absolutely Not Going There.

“Are you moping in Shakespeare again?” Bennie called out, and the resulting bicker over it being _early modern English_ and not _Shakespeare speak_ managed to air the worst of his nerves out.

Which was entirely the point. Bennie wasn’t an airhead, she just played one on stage.

Meanwhile, Kris had managed to winkle out a pair of flats that were around his size. Just a bit too large, which was a good thing when your left big toe is a mess of off-brand ointment and gauze padding.

It was also boots, because every last pair of shoes Kris owned was boots, but there you go. Beggars. Choosers.

“ _Shirley_ *, I really want to wear my wedge heels with this.”

*A social novel by Charlotte Brontë, more famously known as the author of _Jane Eyre_.

“You mean those godawful Barbie-pink contraptions?” Lizette scoffed. “Lana, you’re going to turn an ankle in those things.”

“Some of us have ankles thicker than a toothpick, Liz.”

“My point exactly. How can you possibly expect those flimsy heels to hold up your entire ass?”

“I will stab you with a drinks umbrella, Liz.”

She was a friend, really. Just. A very, very annoying friend.

Ass.

\- - -

Ten minutes to the opening act. Mikayla was onstage, fussing with the microphone.

Bennie and Lizette had, very firmly and mostly politely, claimed their usual seats at the bar already.

Kris was already off trawling for dance partners, even though the floor would close for the night’s performances. Hopefully Jamie would get off work in time to drive her home; or, at least, heckle.

Lana checked around the edges of her wig, making sure it wasn’t slipping again. Granted, she’d been going bald since undergrad, but a receding hairline wasn’t any more attractive on a middle-aged woman than on a middle-aged man.

She wanted to feel pretty, damn it.

“Lans! Get up here and announce me, you lazy butt!”

“Hold your horses, Mic, I’m on my way up,” she yelled back.

Lana took one last look in her trusty make-up mirror. Tonight, she _was_ pretty.

-shit, shit, damn it, that was a stray hair. Maybe nobody would notice?

Even if no one else did, Lana would notice. And Lana was not going onstage with an unkempt beard.

At her own peril, Lana interrupted Bennie and Lizette. “Liz, Bennie, please tell me one of you has tweezers?”

Lizette, like some scantily-clad Copperfield*, produced tweezers from somewhere within her outfit.

*David Copperfield. Stage magician. Read a book.

“Thank-you-so-much.” Hurriedly, she plucked one-and-two stray hairs off the curve of her jawline. How had she missed this? She had rouge on!

Fucking broken fucking _toenail_.

“You can thank me later. I take payment in wine, and not the cheap stuff.”

“You’re a tart, Liz.”

“Lana, get _going_ ,” Bennie urged. “And Liz? Don’t be a pustule.”

They both stopped.

Bennie shrugged. “Lana knows some fun old words. Now seriously, if I have to carry you-”

Favoring the better part of valor, Lana went. Bennie did not make empty threats.

In passing, Mikayla clapped her on the back.

Lana breathed deeply. It was hot under the lights, and she was getting uncomfortably sweaty.

Mikayla rattled around offstage, doing her warm-up vocal exercises at the last minute.

Fuck, forty years onstage and Lana was still suffering stage fright.

The stage lights shone down on her, spotlight lancing directly into her eyes.

She looked up anyways, keeping her gaze just slightly over the heads of the gathered crowd. Even without seeing them, she knew that the girls were cheering for her and Mikayla.

Mic was done lambasting the poor sound technician. That terrifying old woman at the piano was done limbering up. And the show must go on.

Lana smiled for the audience. “Ladies, gentlemen, and queers of all stripes, welcome to Goldie’s Paradise! Tonight, your ears will be blessed by the melodic stylings of Fantastic Mic, covering Cole Porter’s classic composition for _Kiss Me, Kate_ – ‘I Hate Men!’”

The audience laughed, the music started playing, and the spotlight swung over. Let it!

Lana was singing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” next.

**Author's Note:**

> *jiminy freaking crap, I know nothing about drag queens, why did I just write an entire story about drag queens? please lmk if I’m being the kind of offensive that isn’t funny. I will, if needed, seek to correct that.
> 
> sources:  
> \- [Lancer swearing hc](https://five-rivers.tumblr.com/post/644523751645544448/prompt-lancer-swore-often-before-becoming-a)  
> \- [Shirley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_\(novel\))  
> \- [songs featured in this fic](https://genius.com/albums/Cole-porter/Kiss-me-kate)  
> \- and I cannot remember who, but someone on tumblr mentioned Lancer having a history in Amity Park's gay and drag scene and- yeah, yep, I ran /away/ with it.


End file.
